You’re supposed to be quiet in the library. At a go-go show? Not so much. But the shouts have joined the “shhhh”s at the D.C. Public Library, courtesy of a new photo collection. Nearly 2,000 photographs taken by Chip Py at area go-go shows are available for viewing and download at DigDC, the library’s local history portal.
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“I lived in go-go for about five years,” said Py, 57. “I went out every night and got home at 4 in the morning.”
He’d transfer the digital files — from Chuck Brown at the Howard Theatre to Rare Essence at La Fontaine Bleue — then head to his day job selling ads for the Gazette newspapers.
Someone once asked Py if he fell asleep at work after a night of music.
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“Hell no,” he answered. “I come out of there with energy. The beat is so infectious, it carried me through all that.”
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The Silver Spring photographer is perhaps an unlikely person to chronicle go-go. For starters, he’s White. And he didn’t come up in that scene. Py had been shooting a lot of local shows — including, frankly, the shows of a lot of old White guy bands — when he realized any chronicle of D.C. music would have to include go-go.
“All I knew was that Chuck Brown was in the lottery commercials at the time,” Py said.
When Py started going to go-go shows, he pretty much stopped shooting old White guy bands, swept up in go-go’s epic, rhythmic, overwhelmingly participatory performances, where the drummers work a pocket as deep as the Mariana Trench and the audience and band seem to become one.
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Musicians, managers and promoters were happy to grant Py access, he said.
“I never had any problems,” Py said. “I was welcomed into go-go. Within less than a month, I was one of Chuck’s official photographers.”
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Around the same time Py was beginning his project, Derek Gray, an archivist at the D.C. Public Library, was taking stock. The library’s local history division — now called the People’s Archive — had chosen to focus on two types of music deeply rooted in the city: punk rock and go-go.
“I did an assessment of the collection before Chuck Brown passed and basically found we had very little on go-go,” Gray said. “We had several newspaper articles and a few oral history transcripts from the ’80s. That was pretty much it.”
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After Brown’s death in 2012, the library redoubled its efforts to build the go-go collection. Among the newspaper clippings, posters, magazines and oral history transcripts were just 10 photos. Some were of Brown being honored by the Maryland legislature in Annapolis.
“As wonderful as those were, they were obviously not D.C. and not performances,” Gray said.
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The photos acquired from Py address that imbalance. They stretch from 2010 to the “Don’t Mute D.C.” protests of 2019.
“I’m excited,” Gray said. “It just fills an enormous hole when you go from 10 photos — nonperformance photos of the godfather of go-go — to 2,010.”
Filling a hole was the first step. The next is building a mountain. The photographs join a collection that now includes the research materials Howard University scholar and author Natalie Hopkinson used for her 2012 book, “Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City.”
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Gray wants even more.
“I hope that it encourages other go-go photographers to donate or consider donating to us,” he said. He wants ephemeral objects like ticket stubs and posters. The business records of managers, promoters and bands — itineraries, contracts — will help future researchers, too.
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“Also I would say please get in touch with us to have your story recorded, because oral histories are very important to this collection,” Gray said.
He envisions the collection being used both by fans and by historians who want to explore the music and its connection to Washington.
Py is working on a book on go-go that will come out in the spring. I asked him if it was hard to convey the intensely three-dimensional, aural experience of a go-go show in the two dimensions of a photograph.
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“When I photograph stuff, if I can sense someone’s passion, I can capture it,” he said. “That’s what I saw there. One thing about a go-go: When you walk into the room, it’s an event.”
To see the Chip Py Go-Go Collection, go to digdc.dclibrary.org. If you think you’d like to share some of your go-go memorabilia or memories, send an email to peoples.archive@dc.gov.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.